The whir of news helicopters flying overhead has long been a familiar soundtrack to life in Los Angeles – and the footage they gather of high-speed chases, wildfires and celebrity sightings a fixture of local television.

For nearly 70 years, Angelenos have gotten their news from “the eye in the sky” – from scenes of OJ Simpson’s fleeing white Bronco, the 1992 LA riots and even Madonna’s wedding to Sean Penn.

On Tuesday, one of those news helicopters crashed live on air while covering the collision of an SUV and a city bus, killing journalist Eliana Moreno, pilot George Marciniw and one person on the ground.

The incident has prompted an outpouring of support for the families, and reflection on the sometimes dangerous and uniquely Californian history of helicopter journalism.

The world’s first “Telecopter” debuted in Los Angeles in 1958, after John Silva, chief engineer for KTLA-TV, retrofitted a helicopter into a flying news studio with ultra-light camera equipment that could transmit footage live from the air. An electronics engineer who’d worked as a radar operator during the second world war, Silva was uniquely suited to the task.

Although KTLA had been the first commercially licensed television station in the city, a growing number of competitors in the 1950s made attracting viewers a growing concern.

In a 2002 interview for the Archive of American Television, Silva recalled his inspiration: “If we could build a news mobile unit in a helicopter we could get over it all, get there first, avoid the traffic and get to all the stories before anybody in the competition.”

Over the next decade, the Telecopter would capture scenes from the Bel Air fire, the Baldwin Hills Dam disaster and the Watts riots.

In the 1980s, the married couple Zoey Tur and Marika Gerrard of the Los Angeles News Service would take up the torch of helicopter reporting – capturing footage of the attack on Reginald Denny during the LA riots and OJ Simpson’s white Bronco chase.

“The city was undergoing a truly tumultuous time,” Matt Yoka, the producer of the documentary Whirylbird told KCRW in a 2021 interview. “I think in one sense, the work that Zoey and Marika were doing was simply trying to bring that into the homes of the people of Los Angeles watching the nightly news.”

Spending their days in the sky, Tur and Gerrard were uniquely positioned to capture breaking news. In a 2024 interview with NBC News, Gerrard recalled how she and Tur were flying over the El Toro ‘Y’ interchange when they heard on the scanner that Simpson’s Bronco had been spotted nearby: “So I slid the door of the helicopter open and then pointed the camera down, and low and behold there was the white Bronco.”

That practicality has made helicopters a crucial tool for news reporters in the vast cities of the US West.

“A news helicopter is more than a flying camera,” Tammy Rose, a helicopter reporter for ABC-13 in Houston, told the Associated Press. “As a reporter aboard the aircraft, I could see the larger scene, communicate with the newsroom, gather information and report live while events were unfolding.”

Yet, since their earliest use, news helicopters have faced real hazards – from mechanical failures to drone and bird strikes.

In 1977, a KNBC helicopter ran out of fuel and crashed after covering a Santa Barbara wildfire, killing cameraman George Spears and pilot Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 pilot who’d survived being shot down during a spy mission in the Soviet Union.

Since 2000, there have been at least eight fatal crashes involving news helicopters in the United States, killing 16 people.

Those crashes led to some reforms, like all Phoenix news stations agreeing to share one helicopter after a 2007 crash – but some former helicopter journalists worry newsrooms turn to the helicopter too quickly.

“Viewers need information about mass riots, natural disasters and building explosions, especially when news crews on the ground can’t reach the sites. But do mundane street closures and beauty shots really serve the public?” former helicopter reporter Thanh Tan wrote in an op-ed for the Seattle Times after a local helicopter crashed in 2014. “Newsrooms should not send crews into the skies just because they can or to vie for viewership.”

After shaky and emotional footage direct from the helicopter appeared to show the crash, NBC Los Angeles confirmed the deaths of journalist Moreno, pilot Marciniw and pedestrian Edy Fernando Gutiérrez Mejía.

“We are coming on the air with heavy hearts tonight because we lost valued friends and colleagues,” NBC Los Angeles anchor Colleen Williams said on air Tuesday. “We are going to take a couple of minutes to think about that, to process, and to regroup.”

Working for Angel City Air, Moreno and Marciniw had provided aerial coverage for NBC4 and Telemundo 52 for years.

Moreno, nicknamed “Eli in the Heli”, had begun working as a helicopter journalist in 2010, after she graduated from Chapman University. A bilingual reporter in her 30s, Moreno was engaged to be married and had recently completed a marathon.

Her colleague, Jonathan Gonzalez, a weekend news anchor and reporter for NBC Los Angeles, told NBC, “she was damn good at what she did.”

In a statement, Moreno’s family said she’d dreamed of being a news reporter since she was 11 years old and that much of her journey into journalism “was made possible by all of you who welcomed her into your homes and onto your screens”.

“We are infinitely proud of her and feel incredibly blessed to have had the privilege of loving her,” they wrote.

Her longtime colleague, pilot Marciniw, was eyeing retirement after more than 30 years as a helicopter pilot when the crash happened, fellow pilot Esteban Jimenez said. “I knew him since the ’90s. He was my instructor at one time; he was my eyes and ears here in LA,” Jimenez said.

Mejía, known by his nickname “Pichi”, was visiting Los Angeles and had arrived in the city only two days prior. According to a cousin, he’d planned to pick up a car and take it home to sell in Cuilapa, a town in south-eastern Guatemala. His family is now working to repatriate his body.

Just weeks before the crash, in her final Instagram post, Moreno had shared her enthusiasm for helicopter reporting. Captioning a photograph from Whiteman airport, Moreno wrote about covering the summer’s wildfires and how aerial footage allowed her to show the path of a growing fire.

“It just goes to show the power that we have from being the eye in the sky,” she said.